Cross Concerto (クロスコンチェルト) Review

I’ve always thought the Japanese eroge industry should learn some new tricks. Try new game styles, beef up the interaction systems, expand the settings and worldbuilding, and open up more distribution channels — Steam, say, with a Simplified Chinese launch on day one. Boost sales on one hand, improve quality on the other.

But things never go the way I imagine. The Japanese eroge industry learned the first half and threw away the second.

In other words, they started caring more and more about sales and profit. Improve quality? Doesn’t exist. Once in a while there’s a seemingly sincere “big-budget production,” and it’s still some baffling wildcard where the writer runs wild, it bombs, and the whole brand vanishes.

Unlike those wildcards, most of the old brands that “can’t afford to lose” went for steady, solid… scamming.

So we get more and more volume splits and Steam releases, plus all kinds of blunt, simplistic premises. They honestly don’t care what the story’s like — as long as it sells and makes money, that’s fine.

This quick-cash approach naturally left the companies that “actually tell a good story” half-dead. But some of them learned a new trick: crowdfunding.

I’ve always thought eroge are a great fit for crowdfunding. After all, you make a good game and a bunch of people pirate it — better to set a price and crowdfund a preorder, at least you break even and maybe turn a small profit.

So in 2017, the company Apprinkle (あっぷりけ), feeling like it was about to go under, decided to launch a crowdfunding campaign to make a game called Cross Concerto (クロスコンチェルト).

I actually played this game a long time ago, but then stalled on it for a while. The reason is simple: it’s boring.

The premise looks simple enough at first: a brother and sister. The brother has no right arm; the sister has no left eye. The brother’s right arm is a mechanical prosthetic, and the sister’s left eye is a fake eye that can “foresee the future.”

The two siblings leave their mountain village and come to this school to study, bringing along a maid named Kyouka.

Then, in their school life, the sister Ruri uses her “future sight” to solve a few problems, and warns her brother that a female student named Saijou Mika will kill herself in the future.

To save Mika, the brother goes out of his way to investigate, and even uses his mechanical arm to throw a steel pipe at the landing spot when Mika jumps, cushioning her fall and saving her life.

After that the game plays an OP2, and the story enters the boring phase — or rather the “what the hell is going on” phase. The game lets you go after the “peripheral side characters” first, then the “side characters,” and finally the “main heroine,” who as you’d expect is the sister, Ruri.

I can only describe each route in this game as “hazy as hell.” Extremely fragmented. The only thing I can be sure of is that you establish a relationship with the heroine, have sex, and then the ED plays and it’s over. The stuff touching on the core main plot left me completely lost. Let me sum it up:

• The siblings used to live in a mountain village. The sister was the family’s “prophet” with great power in the village, while the brother was “the abandoned one,” to the point of being dragged off as a living sacrifice to the prophet.
• The area around the school they attend has an “undeveloped zone,” said to have once belonged to the “Saijou family,” with abandoned houses, a shrine, and a torii gate.
• That abandoned place is home to an “aramitama,” a kind of Japanese spirit — you can think of it as a “demon,” more or less.
• That aramitama used to be calm, but recently started acting up often — luring normal people in to make them living sacrifices. The protagonist was lured in, and every sub-heroine was more or less affected by the aramitama. The individual routes are nothing more than solving the aramitama problem.
• There’s another question in the game: the protagonist and his sister weren’t originally allowed to leave the village, yet they got out. No idea how.
• Before the final route, the sister Ruri and the protagonist confront the aramitama and get wrecked. The sister falls into the aramitama’s pit and dies — and as she dies, she realizes the aramitama’s power is absorbing the memories of everyone caught up in it.

So before the final route, from all these fragments I could at least piece together this much: the understandable part is just “there’s a haunted house with a ghost in the suburbs.” And the sister already died falling at the end of the previous section — so how’s the final route supposed to be written?

Then the game plays a completely pointless OP3, and we finally reach the True End. And this True End really left me speechless. Still fragmented, but at least it resolves things.

• The sister Ruri has had her “future sight” since childhood. She saw her whole life play out from a young age.
• She also saw the future where she and her brother would leave the village.
• The future she sees is “dynamic” — it changes as the present changes. Say Ms. Wang is going to a matchmaking meeting tomorrow, and the day before, Pigeon Girl suddenly confesses to her — then “Ms. Wang’s matchmaking meeting tomorrow” becomes “having sex with Pigeon Girl.”
• The final True End takes place in a different world line. In this one, the sister has absorbed the aramitama’s power, gained the memories of all the different victims it collected, and naturally understands what happened in other world lines — what the protagonist (the brother) and the heroines did in each.
• In the end the utterly badass sister decides to take on the aramitama again, breaks free of the illusion it created, and finally calms the thing down.

The aramitama is appeased, the game ends, and the siblings can be together again.

Honestly, this game is, simply put… there’s a ghost in the suburbs that keeps hurting people. A sister with superpowers sees through all the world lines where people fail to beat the ghost, and finally finds the one possibility that succeeds, and subdues it.

So why does such a simple story have to be dragged out so long and so tediously?

And most importantly, apart from the final chapter where the sister’s story actually resolves the game’s various mysteries, all the earlier setup is boring filler. Meanwhile those “most important parts” have no character sprites, no direction, and no voice acting — just stiff walls of text on a single screen. Makes me wonder if the budget ran out.

Which brings us back to the point. Don’t forget, this game was crowdfunded.

Let’s look at the game’s crowdfunding page, and you’ll find this image: http://uneedzone.jp/info.php?type=items&id=I0000043

The game was originally planned with only two heroines. But since more people joined the crowdfunding than expected, they added tiers for various “side heroines.” The final “spin-off featuring the previous game’s heroine” didn’t happen, but at least they got the game made.

Now it’s not hard to see why the game’s story structure is so weird.

Because from the start, the premise only concerned the sister. And let’s keep going — look at the various statements on the crowdfunding page:

“We’ve packed in all the most popular elements from the games we’ve sold before, and it’s a work that offers ‘peace of mind.’ We welcome everyone to join the crowdfunding.”

Put all this together and it means: this game of ours is a hodgepodge. Whatever you like, we’ll write it. And there will absolutely be no landmines. So just open your wallets with confidence.

And so we got this game: a flat, bland common route, baffling individual routes, and a final True End that’s a bit perfunctory but also entirely expected, with zero surprises.

And the final route is also very cheap — no idea if the 25 million yen ran out. I should also mention Kiri Tsuki’s writing style, which has gotten more and more old-fashioned. A lot of it reads as noticeably “difficult” and “stodgy.” I don’t know how old the writer is — maybe pushing 50? There used to be a Kiri Tsuki fanboy on G+; wonder what he’d think of this game.

This game wasted a lot of my time, and I never played the “previous game,” Concerto Note (コンチェルトノート), but I think just getting this game made was no small feat. After all, judging from the crowdfunding remarks, this was probably the company’s last work — they couldn’t keep going.

If you’re going under anyway, may as well see it through to the end. Even if the game’s rough and the story’s a mess, at least the ending is still kind of beautiful, no?